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Disagree. Customer support is not free. Good customer support is not cheap. Whether you agree or not, good CS is one of the Zappos differentiators. There are o

• blagie 3y ago
  Quite often, higher-profit higher-margin businesses are more robust. If you have a 1% margin, and costs increase by 2%, you're bleeding money. If you have a 50% profit margin, you're not sensitive to small (or even medium) fluctuations. That's not a universal. I can give a half-dozen counterexamples (including Walmart) which, for example, operate with extreme efficiency, or achieve massive scale. But it's a good rule-of-thumb. Running a business, there are sometimes more important things than profit. Robust businesses are more pleasant to run and to work in than ones with razer-thin margins (even if bigger and more profitable). As an entrepreneur, if I were to pick: 1) Guaranteed income of $200k for the rest of my life (inflation-adjusted) with fun work and reasonable work-life balance 2) A $20M payout with 50% odds I think I'd pick #1. Ergo, we see a lot of lifestyle businesses, businesses which don't try to grow, or otherwise. Yes, one can make a lot of arguments about fiduciary duty, shareholders, etc. Some of those are even correct for a large, public corporation. But most don't apply to a founder-owned founder-run business.